


Cadbury Creme

by Anna_Hopkins



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Chocolate, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, I don't know how to tag this, M/M, Post-Hogwarts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-02
Updated: 2018-05-02
Packaged: 2019-05-01 01:03:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14509116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anna_Hopkins/pseuds/Anna_Hopkins
Summary: Prompt fill: "coffee shop!AU Tom just wants to take over the world in peace. Instead, that new coffee shop with beautiful desserts to feed his sweet tooth keeps distracting him."I don't know if I've ever filled a prompt in quite the way it was given. The original plot gets away from me too easily. That said, I'm quite pleased with how this one turned out; comments are welcome!





	Cadbury Creme

**Author's Note:**

  * For [qualamity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/qualamity/gifts), [ChachiSummer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChachiSummer/gifts).



> Prompt fill: "coffee shop!AU Tom just wants to take over the world in peace. Instead, that new coffee shop with beautiful desserts to feed his sweet tooth keeps distracting him."
> 
> I don't know if I've ever filled a prompt in quite the way it was given. The original plot gets away from me too easily. That said, I'm quite pleased with how this one turned out; comments are welcome!

_Historians so often understate those factors of war that influence it most – such is the case for the Blood War in Britain. What little is known about the years preceding the first battle have been embellished and distorted by what people want to_ believe _; most modern accounts of the 1950s and 60s claim the war was only a continuation of Grindelwald’s legacy._

_Relatively little in comparison has been written about the Dark Lord at the center of the modern conflict, known, variously, as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, as You-Know-Who, and – among his most zealous opponents – as Lord Voldemort. He emerged into the public eye in 1970 and sustained the war through his disappearance in 1981, but the speed with which the Dark Lord became the face of the blood purist movement, particularly its military arm, the Knights of Walpurgis (later, the Death Eaters), suggests a preceding influence the likes of which has not previously been seen among wizardkind._

_The only wizards who would have known more about the Dark Lord’s past, however, remain as unknown as the wizard himself. The infamous Death Eater Trials conducted in the last five years have not provided any leads for those who wish to investigate further; indeed, some rumors suggest – despite numerous eyewitness accounts to the contrary – that there was never a Lord Voldemort at all…_

_(From ‘The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts’, 1985 edition)_

* * *

 

Tom Riddle’s first foray into the magical world at eleven left him with a rather different impression than most Muggle-raised witches and wizards. London, in 1937, was in the middle of rationing – indeed, he had seen Muggles starving in the streets, and feared he might soon join them – but wizards, evidently, never lacked for food.

His first thought, if he’d had a sense for fairness, would have been that this dichotomy was _patently unfair_. But Tom Riddle was a natural Slytherin if ever there was one – he saw the portly wizards at Fortescue’s with their heaping mounds of ice cream and thought gleefully, _I will never go hungry again_.

He spent two Sickles on a Never-Ending-Sundae and promptly ate himself sick.

Seven years of Hogwarts feasts were not nearly enough to satisfy a young man’s craving for chocolate, not when rations grew stricter year by year and the Blitz destroyed the only penny candy store for miles; nevertheless, Tom kept his interests under wraps lest he attract the scorn of his Slytherin housemates, who had clearly never wanted for food in three generations. He attended every one of Horace Slughorn’s dinner parties, not out of a sense of ambition (though it certainly helped in his fifth year), but mostly for the confections the fat wizard favored at dessert.

(Privately, he might have tried harder to win over Albus Dumbledore if only the man hadn’t confiscated his Cadbury Eggs.)

Though he would have liked to stay on after graduating, after Hogwarts, Tom instead worked for Borgin and Burke’s until he’d saved enough to travel, as was tradition; ostensibly, he went abroad in search of undiscovered magical artifacts and esoteric knowledge that would prove useful later. It was largely coincidence that the Aztecs regularly drank chocolate – that the Swedes he joined in the Congo were on an agricultural expedition funded by Lindt & Sprungli – that his time in Germany coincided more with the _Internationale Kochkunst-Ausstellung_ and the reopening of the KaDeWe in West Berlin than the pureblood social scene. If he spent more time in those places than in the countries that actually fulfilled his pretenses, ahem, his goals, for travelling…nobody needed to know.

Lord Voldemort’s return from abroad was met with much encouragement from his Inner Circle; he put his fount of knowledge (for he _had_ gone in search of knowledge, in between distractions) to immediate use, and by 1979 had nearly all of Britain under his thumb.

He was very nearly secure in his immortality by the time Severus Snape brought word of a prophecy in May of 1980 – enough, at least, that in ’81 he reconstituted his body over Innsbruck by sheer force of will (and a bit of cravings). Given that the long-term plan had always included an intermission, albeit one further along the timeline, he wrote Lucius of the amended strategy and decided to take a short holiday from open warfare.

In retrospect, perhaps ‘short’ was not the best word for it, in the eyes of mortal wizards, but it could have been much longer. Lord Voldemort visited Britain several times during his holiday without planning to stay; it was sheer coincidence that the last of those times, in 1998, he discovered the Boy-Who-Lived.

Or rather, his café in Soho, Harry’s Place.


End file.
